An Ornithologist's Guide to Life (22 page)

“Really?” Marjorie says, surprised. “They aren't lovable at all to me.”

“M
RS
. M
ACOMBER
?” Justin says.

He has a way of appearing behind her, out of nowhere, and frightening her. It is very hot today, and humid. He is covered with a shiny layer of sweat, and standing close enough that his smell seems to cling to Marjorie.

“I can't find the gasoline, for the mower. Maybe you're out?”

Marjorie sighs. She has left the cool comfort of central air conditioning inside just long enough to get in her car and drive to the pool at the club. All she has on is a navy blue
shift dress, her bathing suit underneath, and sandals. She doesn't want to get all hot and sweaty rummaging through the garage.

“Well,” she says, “did you root around inside?” She motions toward the garage behind them. Between them, the hot air ripples. What was it Bonnie said he looked like? A god? Dizzy from the heat, Marjorie can agree. But he smells so ungodly, so earthbound. She wishes he would wear a shirt, at least.

“That's how I know you're out,” he says, cocky.

She can't imagine Gary would let something like this happen. It's his job to take care of things like gasoline for the lawn mower, and oil changes for both cars. And hiring gardeners, she adds, turning around and going into the cool dark of the garage. She never comes in here. It smells like metal and fuel, a smell that tastes metallic on her tongue. The light has to be turned on by a string that hangs from a bulb somewhere; she can't find it.

But the boy has followed her inside and says, “It's supposed to be over here.”

Instead of searching for the light, Marjorie follows him to one distant corner. She wonders if she's ruining her sandals, getting motor oil on them.

“See for yourself,” he says.

She pokes around, among mulch and watering cans and a garden hose coiled up like a snake.

“Hey,” the boy says. “Boss.”

She turns and he is right up behind her in that way he has. Marjorie feels a dull throb in her groin. This is so cliché, she thinks. She wonders what he expects from her. Is he stupid enough to believe she will grab him and take him
right here? But as she thinks it she feels a quiver in her thighs, high up.

“You're a stupid arrogant boy,” she says.

He laughs and moves right up to her, pressing her lightly into the bags of mulch. The garden hose is hard against her shins.

“Lady,” Justin says, not even bothering to whisper. “You drive me nuts. I mean, I know you're probably even older than my mother, but the way you lay out there all greased up, with that flat stomach and those gorgeous tits, I'm about to go crazy.”

Is this really me he's talking about? Marjorie thinks, excited by the idea that a boy who looks like this boy would think of her this way.

“I'm going to be a grandmother,” she says.

It is the first time she has ever spoken to him in such a voice, inviting and honest. She imagines she has not used this voice in years, since she was a girl not much older than him, before all the things that happen to a person had happened.

“No shit,” Justin says, and lets out a low whistle.

Marjorie reaches up and pulls out the rubber band that hold his dark hair in its ponytail. His hair spills out around him like a girl's.

“Can I touch you?” he says.

She is surprised he asks; his boldness and confidence imply that he just takes what he wants.

As if someone else is controlling her movements, Marjorie takes his hand and moves it under her shift, inside her bathing suit, to where she is hot and wet.

He moans.

Is it possible that she still has this kind of power over someone so young and beautiful? His fingers, rough from garden work, slip inside her and move in the right way. She wonders how many girls he has had, so young.

When Marjorie was in high school and college she believed her virginity was a precious thing, and she held on to it until she and Gary were properly engaged, the wedding date set, everything official. What she did in those days—and what she has not done since—was to take boys into her mouth, feel them swell and push and then burst with come that she used to drink up.

It had seemed back then, groping in cars, burning for sex—her too! she had wanted it as badly as she wants this boy now—that taking them in her mouth was a less intimate act than the real one. That it was somehow all right; that it didn't count. And even though now she knows better, knows it is much more intimate to swallow someone's come, that it does, indeed, count, she kneels on top of the coiled hose and unzips Justin's cutoff jeans—no underwear! His penis springs out at her, beautiful, young, hard. A pale blue vein pulsates across the length of it; Marjorie takes all of him in her mouth, and it is as if she is a young girl herself, a teenager in someone's white Impala, kneeling on the dusty floor, swallowing every inch of them.

Justin comes in such a loud burst, shooting warm come into her mouth, grasping her head between his hands so that he is even deeper, forcing his come down her throat. It is bitter, lovely. When he finally slides from her mouth, he kneels too, on the hard cold floor, and kisses her for the first time, as gentle as a baby.

B
ONNIE AND
T
ED
have invited them for dinner. This is the night, Marjorie supposes, that Bonnie will tell them the good news. But ever since the morning she first went into the garage with Justin six weeks ago, Marjorie has felt disembodied. She waits for him to arrive on Wednesday and Saturday mornings; she watches from the little window over the kitchen sink as he weeds and clips and mows. By the time he arrives she is all ready for him—a dress, her sandals, and nothing underneath. Marjorie is forty-nine years old and she has never done anything like this. She has been a faithful wife, a good mother, a friend and neighbor others rely on. As summer wears on, she has even helped the woman next door, now almost obscenely pregnant, search for this oldest daughter, Jessica, who hides in small places and will not talk.

Still she meets Justin in the garage, goes to the dark cold corner, and does things with him that she has not done since she was young. She and Gary, who always have had a good solid sex life—even now, married twenty-seven years, they make love once or twice a week. Even now, there are surprises, like that night on the patio.

But there is nothing like this, with this boy, except what she had when she was young and passionate, the hands everywhere, in and out of holes, the desperate licking, as if they could actually literally devour each other. And then,
this
Saturday morning, she finally took him inside her house and inside her, right upstairs on Bonnie's childhood bed, with the white eyelet spread bought at Bloomingdale's, and the frilled canopy that made Bonnie believe she might be a princess.

And now here is Marjorie, in her navy blue summer slacks and striped boat neck cotton sweater, her crotch filled with the ache that good long sex leaves with you, sitting in her daughter's living room at the beach house with an ice cold martini, chewing on cashews, listening to Gary and Ted discuss their morning golf game. She had forgotten what young boys were like, how they stayed hard so long, and could make love twice in the same morning, growing hard again so quickly.

“How is that gorgeous thing?” Bonnie asks Marjorie.

Marjorie holds her breath.

“That god that Daddy hired for the yard,” Bonnie says.

“He's off to college,” Gary answers. “Phong's son is going to take over next week.”

“But that can't be,” Marjorie says, with too much enthusiasm so that they are all staring at her, confused. “I mean,” she stammers, “he isn't bright enough for college.”

Gary shrugs. “Just the state school. But he'll be living there. Besides, you don't like him. Mother thinks he's going to steal something. Or murder us.”

Ted and Gary laugh, but Bonnie is studying her mother's face and frowning. Marjorie recognizes the bloated blotchy skin of early pregnancy.

“I think Mother has a crush on this boy,” Bonnie says finally. She eats the olive out of Ted's martini and sits back, self-satisfied.

“Absolutely,” Marjorie says, coolly. “Every morning when he's finished with his work, I take him inside and make love to him until Daddy pulls up from golf. He's delicious actually.”

Only Gary laughs. “That's a good one, old girl,” he says, slapping her knee.

Ted and Bonnie look at each other, embarrassed.

Then Ted refills all the drinks and stands, raising his own martini glass, his initials
TBC
etched into it, and says, “Well, then. It seems time for a toast.”

He's practically bursting with his news. Marjorie feels smug, satisfied. She already knows their news, and she has secrets of her own. Good ones, she thinks, still feeling the sting of Gary's playful slap.

“A toast,” Ted says, “to the new, about to be grandparents.”

Gary looks shocked. His cheeks redden. “My God,” he says, then shakes Ted's hand with ridiculous enthusiasm, as if, Marjorie thinks, fucking is something to be congratulated.

“Here's to me then,” she says. At first, downing the cold martini, she is smiling at her own little joke. But suddenly, from nowhere, she finds herself crying. Sobbing, really. Unable to stop, to catch her breath, to do anything but stand there and cry.

M
ARJORIE DOES THE
unthinkable. She waits for Justin to come loping up the street and, before he can disappear into the garage to get the lawn mower, she calls him inside, in a too loud voice—those new people seem to be everywhere, all the time.

“Justin!” Marjorie says. “I need some help with the air conditioning system. It's making an odd noise.”

He stands at the foot of the driveway, thumbs hooked in his cutoffs' pockets, smirking.

“Really?” he says. “I'm not very good with electrical stuff.” He speaks loudly too.

In high school, Marjorie was an actress, the star of all the school plays—
Our Town
and
A Streetcar Named Desire
and, in her senior year,
The Children's Hour
. She has forgotten how that felt, to be on stage, to be watched, until right now.

“I'm hot,” she announces. “It can't wait.”

And then she does the really unthinkable. Marjorie leads him into
her
room, hers and Gary's, onto
their
bed. The room is, she realizes as Justin stands naked in the middle of it, stuffy and imposing. The smell of peach potpourri hangs in the air with its false aroma, not at all reminiscent of peaches. It's the room of two old people. Marjorie sees that now.

But Justin is on her, with his sex talk, dirty and guttural in a way that no one has ever spoken to her.

“Give me that pussy,” he says. “Fuck me.”

And later he tells her that her tits are fantastic, that she tastes so good, that her ass drives him nuts. The talk does something to her, to
them
, because even though the clock—a silly old lady clock from a long ago trip to Germany, Switzerland, and Austria—is inching toward noon, when Gary gets back from golf and late morning martinis, Marjorie is back on Justin, frantically pulling him into her.

The voice that floats up from downstairs—“
Mrs. Macomber? You home?
” —frightens Marjorie so much that she yelps, and thinks for a moment she might faint.

“
Mrs. Macomber?
”

Marjorie grabs her robe, pulls it on, and races downstairs where, standing in the foyer, is the mother from next door.

“I'm sorry to bother you,” the woman says, frowning.
Her maternity top, pink with blue giraffes bouncing across her grossly large belly, is pulled tight.

Marjorie knows what she's thinking, how odd it is for someone like Marjorie to be still in her robe this late in the morning. Is she thinking too that the garden boy has come in and never gone back out? The lawn is unmowed, the hedges unclipped. Dandelions poke their heads out here and there.

“I was getting into the shower,” Marjorie says.

A thin stream of come trickles out of her, down her thigh, and she pushes her legs together.

“It's just Jessica again,” the woman says, arms open in apology. “Except this time she took Ashley with her.”

“You know she hides in the garage,” Marjorie says.

The grandfather's clock chimes noon; Gary could walk in right now. Upstairs, Justin is naked, hard, waiting. And more than anything, that is where Marjorie wants to be too, with that boy, in his tattooed arms, feeling his long hair on her breasts. For a crazy moment, Marjorie thinks she will run off with him. She will leave everything and go with this boy somewhere.

Annoyed, Marjorie says, “Have you looked in the garage?”

The woman blushes and nods.

“It's just so hard for me to get around,” she explains. “And it's so hot out.” Then she looks at Marjorie, expressionless, and says, “It ain't hot in here, though. Is it?”